I’ve written in the past about how sometimes during the slow times at work that I can get really bored. I hate saying that I’m bored at work because I know there are things I can do to be productive with my time. But it’s tough to spend 5 days a week stuck behind a computer when you don’t have anything to do. I’ve tried to find things to keep me busy and that helps. And whenever it’s the busy season and I’m going crazy with customers, I try to remind myself that I will miss having work to do when it gets slow again.
But yesterday, we had a very different type of slow day at work. We are still in our busy season so we have a ton of customers we need to help. But when we opened yesterday, we discovered that our website wasn’t working. And it wasn’t just the public website that was down, all websites that we use for work that aren’t public were down too. We pretty much had no way to do anything related to work. We found out later that this was due to a huge attack on our website host and so many websites were down.
We do have a quick reference sheet to look up some basic information for all of our locations, so we could answer things such as the price for tickets or the venue for each city we have a show in. And there are lots of standard policies that we don’t need the website for. So we could explain our age requirement, dress code, and date transfer policies. But so many of our customers were calling for things such as checking availability, changing entrees, or having an email confirmation resent. And we had no way to access anything we needed to do any of those things.
We have had some customers in the past that have gotten very upset with us when we couldn’t help them with something specific. For example, the box office cannot authorize any exceptions to company policy. If a customer is asking for one (such as bringing someone younger than our age requirement), we pass that on to the producers at that specific location so they can make that decision. Sometimes, customers don’t like that we are just passing information on, but we don’t have another option. And when the website was down, I was afraid that customers would be upset that we couldn’t help them.
It was sometimes funny when a customer would ask for one thing and they would understand that we couldn’t help them with that because our system was down so they asked for something else that would require the system to be up to help them. There were a few calls where the customer asked for 3 or 4 things and all I could do was keep saying that I couldn’t help with that because the website is down. And yes, there were a few customers upset that we weren’t helping them or we couldn’t tell them the exact time the website was running again. I really couldn’t say more than that our IT person was working on it and the website would be up as soon as possible. But sometimes a customer would ask if I thought that would be within 15 minutes or if it would be more like an hour. I just kept repeating that it would be as soon as possible.
Fortunately, that didn’t end up being the case most of the time. So many of the customers I spoke to understood that the website being down was out of my control and that I wasn’t doing it to make things tough on them. And they also understood that I couldn’t tell them when things would be back up and that I had no way to assist them with whatever they were asking of me. It was nice to see how many customers were polite and felt bad because they assumed we had a lot of customers upset that the website was down. I think after having some very difficult situations with customers that I needed this morning of good customers.
But I will say, this made my work pretty frustrating. We had so many voicemails that we needed to return that we couldn’t do because we didn’t want to call people back only to say we couldn’t assist them. We waited to return them until we actually could help. And I know that most of my customers understood why I couldn’t help them, but it was frustrating to not be able to answer some of the simplest questions we got. It was almost like this was a horrible mix of the boredom of the slow season with the chaos of the busy season. And I couldn’t do much about either.
I’m actually writing this post in the middle of my work shift. We’ve gone through half the shift with the system down and because it’s a big outage affecting more than just us, we have no clue when it will be back up. And it’s not any easier telling customers that I cannot help, but at least I’m better at saying it and I have more eloquent ways than I did right when it happened. But I’m just hoping that before today’s shift ends that things will be back up so we can actually do the work we were supposed to do several hours ago. If not, then hopefully it will be up as you are all reading this post and we can finally assist all of the customers from Tuesday.
You Might Also Like
Working On Productivity (or Taking Advantage Of The Slow Season)
Back To Back Work Fails (or Attempting To Be Productive)
Laziness As Self-Care (or Grateful For The Slow Season)
Underemployment Is Frustrating (or Trying To Find The Balance Of Flexibility And Work Hours)
Working To Find Work (or Maybe My Last Work Related Post Did Get Read)
Working The Graveyard (or Starting Work When I’m Normally In Bed)
